"Schopenhauer tells us of a colony of porcupines wont to huddle together...able neither to tolerate nor to do without one another, until they discovered that when they stood at a certain distance..they could delight in one another's individuality and enjoy one another's company. Unknown to themselves they'd invented civil association"

Friday, December 11, 2015

Why The Politics of the Impossible? OK, I'll Bite

“People
routinely say with apparent certainty serious things that are if not patently
false at least highly uncertain. And there is no debate, no confrontation of
facts or analysis. The things people say
are not meant to be measured on the scale of truth. They are only the signs by
which one indicates which team one belongs to, like the ‘identification friend-or-foe’
signals that warplanes emit.”

-Herbert Stein, 1989

At The Federalist today [link at the bottom], Mark Hemingway notes that
progressives are now calling for the confiscation of guns in America and have
established the goal of eliminating gun violence and he asks why, given that
neither the tactic nor goal has any real chance of being realized? Now as The
Heminator isn’t your typical Oregonian to be found naked in a field, I take
it his question is one of them rhetoricals, but why let that stop me from
chiming in with an answer?

I would start by pointing to Kenneth Minogue’s The
Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life. Minogue’s thesis is that
traditional morality is gradually being replaced by the “political-moral.”
Instead of moral concerns and markers like honesty, trustworthiness, humility,
duty to be moral is now associated with voting for the right politicians and
supporting—publicly of course—the right causes. Participate in an ad for ending
gun violence and you can cheat on your spouse, steal water for you lawn, and
treat the help shabbily.

Next, I would point to Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos
which suggests by way of example that the things we typically designate as
tragedies have a positive aspect. Yes, the storm that rips through your town
destroying everything that’s in its path is bad and a tragedy, but it also
makes life exciting and provides a break from the every-day tedium of our
lives. The Percy Formula—copyright @LMandrakeJr, LTD—stipulates the more
impossible the cause the greater its value. Pick a finite goal like stopping
the XYX Development or building a park in the East River Area and soon you’ll
be back in the existential emptiness of not having a cause. That the cause is eternal is a feature, not a bug.

Finally, I would argue that what Hemingway has noted is
symptomatic of what Michael Oakeshott (the philosopher, not the welder) defined
as rationalism in politics. Oakeshott maintained that our current politics were
thoroughly rationalist and went on to describe some of its characteristics:

“He [the Rationalist] is the enemy
of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary, or habitual…He
is optimistic because the Rationalist never doubts the power of his ‘reason’ to
determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion, or the propriety of an
action.

He does not recognize change unless
it is self-consciously induced change.

The politics it inspires may be
called the politics of the felt need; for the Rationalist, politics are always
charged with the feeling of the moment.

And the ‘rational’ solution of any
problem is, in its nature, the perfect solution. There is no in his scheme for
a ‘best in the circumstances’, only a place for ‘the best’; because the
function of reason is precisely to surmount circumstances.”

Later, in a different essay in the same collection Oakeshott
memorably sketches his alternative view of politics:

“In political activity, then, men
sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbor for shelter nor
floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The
enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy;
and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of
behavior in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.”

It is the politics of intimations rather than certainty, of
tacking rather than proceeding “as the crow flies”, of incremental rather than ‘comprehensive’
reform. Yes, please!